He frowned.
"It smells like tear gas and tires burning. It makes me homesick, " I sighed.
He shook his head. "That's not normal, Maia. Close the window."
Not normal. That phrase crops up often, in words or in glances, when I am explaining things about how I grew up. Only seeing my parents on holiday. Watching the government crumble around me, several times. Living within walls topped with shards of glass. Eating soup with the chicken foot sticking out of it. Watching ash cover the city like snow.
My response is always the same. For us, it WAS normal.
Normal hardly means anything to me anymore. I understand the concept but I am always aware that my normal is someone else's strange. Normal is based highly on perspective.
The first move back to the U.S.A. that I was old enough to be fully aware of I remember being really confused. I expressed to my parents that the houses felt exposed or wrong. You could see the front doors. Some of them were wide open. "Where are the walls?" It didn't feel normal.
Meanwhile, here in Indonesia, where I live now, a student began to explain why people had gates around their houses I thought to myself, Of course they have gates around their houses! Why wouldn't they?
I occurred to me that many new teachers might not be used to that kind of thing. That it might not seem normal.
My husband said something to me about students having to get visas renewed and how frustrating that must be. Then it was my turn.
"I just realized that you went your whole childhood never having to renew a visa or your passport. Wow. That's kind of weird. For student's here, visa and passport renewals are just... normal."
Everyone is a little strange. But it's okay. That's normal.
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| Okay, some of us might be a little stranger than others |
The older I get the more everything "normal" seems unbelievably strange. Once you start really looking at alternate possibilities, things that made sense before fall apart rather quickly. Still, people will fight you to the death to maintain their normal, so I tend to keep my mouth shut about it outside of a few small circles. :)
ReplyDeleteI was at a Christian funeral yesterday, as one example, and it was a mostly-somber affair. This makes little sense, given when we believe occurs at death. Particularly because the person who died was in extreme pain for years leading up to this past week, and did not hesitate to tell anyone visiting that she was beyond ready to move on. What seems to me should have been a celebration was subdued for little reason other than society training everyone to "be sad and quiet at funerals." We are a very strange species indeed.
I love this: "I just realized that you went your whole childhood never having to renew a visa or your passport. Wow. That's kind of weird."
ReplyDeleteWe all think of "normal" as being "what I commonly experience/d". In the Third Culture world, it's the monocultural experience that is "strange"!!